Dan Sheehan's Restless Souls is the funniest sad book you'll read

For a book about suicide, the war in Sarajevo, and post traumatic stress disorder, Dan Sheehan's Restless Souls is a hilarious read. It's being billed as part comedy, part road trip, part tragedy, the story of four Irish men and their literal journey to save each other, to reconcile their past.

Dan Sheehan was drawn to Sarajevo.

"I've always been drawn to the idea that when you're attempting to grapple with things such as war, suicide, death and trauma it's important to inject some amount of levity," says Sheehan. "You don't want to overwhelm readers and you don't want people to switch off. The tricky thing is finding the balance, finding the appropriate time."

Karl, Baz, Gabriel and Tom grew up in Dublin, their lives diverging as they hit their 20s. Tom fled to Bosnia to become a war correspondent of sorts, Gabriel committed suicide, hanging himself on the soccer goal posts of their hometown. Karl and Baz fall in and out of relationships and jobs, just a little lost.

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Restless Souls, by Dan Sheehan.

Restless Souls is as much a dissection of male friendship as anything else.

"Those years late teens, early 20s, I had a strong group of male friends," Sheehan says. He grew up in Dublin but moved to New York five years ago at the age of 25.

"We seemed joined at the hip almost. It was an idea I wanted to explore." He particularly wanted to look at how a close group of friends fractures after a tragedy,

"Suicide is so prevalent among young men in Ireland and has been for some time," he said. "I don't think there's anyone from my generation in Ireland whose teens and 20s weren't marked in some way by the suicide of a sibling, a friend, a teammate, a classmate and I've seen the damage it does to the people left behind.

"It was important for me to try and examine that and to see the ripple effects on a group of people, especially those who are close to those who have died."

When he sat down to write Restless Souls he was also drawn to Sarajevo, in particular the siege in the mid-1990s that lasted 1425 days. He holidayed there in 2007 and it brought back childhood memories of the conflict.

"It was the period before the ceasefire in Northern Ireland, before the Good Friday Agreement, so there was a conflict much closer to home that dominated the news.

"But there was something about the dispatches from Bosnia, and from Sarajevo in particular, that seemed so brutal and unending. The idea of this city, this beautiful city, being destroyed and its people being held under siege for such a long period of time – about three times longer than the battle of Stalingrad – the idea of having to live through that, to grow up in that environment, was just something I couldn't believe, it was an impossible situation."

In Restless Souls, Karl and Baz are looking for a cure for Tom, who's returned from Sarajevo a broken man. They find a clinic in Southern California that looks at the idea of "rewriting memories" as a way to treat post traumatic shock. Sheehan says such treatment is being researched in the United States and it fascinated him.

"Most of us have all thought about that notion in some form or another, whether or not there was an event in your life that was so jarring, or something on a much more basic level, something that set you off on a path you never intended to go down.

"We all have that desperate need to rewrite parts of our lives that didn't go the way we planned, deciding if there was a turning point.

"I guess the problem with that is you run the risk of losing parts you don't want to let go of, you change one piece and everything else changes along with it."

Sheehan, whose great uncle was the Irish author Flann O'Brien, grew up in a family with a "literary air", studying literature at Trinity College and University College, Dublin. He was working in the stores department in the basement of a hospital to save up some money while he was freelancing and left for New York with the hopes of making his mark. He's now an editor at Literary Hub and Restless Souls is his first novel.

"My father has just retired in the last month or two and he said he's taken to going to bookshops and talking loudly about how good my book is," Sheehan says. "He's very enthusiastic, which I appreciate, but dad, please, please stop."